Many companies are looking for investors to bring their products to market, and they do so not just by walking right into the Dragons’ Den: trade fairs like MEDICA and COMPAMED are also an ideal marketplace to bring ideas and resources together. But note that in medical technology, there is more behind innovations than just money.

Dr. Daniel Bomze

Dr. Daniel Bomze will be one of the speakers, who will predominantly focus on ceramics as a material for 3D printed medical implants and prosthetics. In this interview with COMPAMED.de, he also explains why 3D printing is a great method to produce medical devices.

Dr. Bomze, what are the benefits of 3D printing to make prosthetics, implants and surgical instruments, especially when you compare this method to other techniques?

Dr. Daniel Bomze: The biggest benefit is the freedom of design. Compared to other manufacturing methods such as injection molding or milling, this technique makes highly complex geometries with overhangs and undercuts possible. What’s more, it also enables the production of parts with tiny features like channels or continuous pores with great attention to detail. The surface can also be adapted to the respective application at the same time. The selection of the right material and 3D model allows the creation of specific surface properties. For devices that come in contact with blood, for example, I try to avoid blood clotting. It helps to have a super smooth surface and bioinert material that doesn’t react with the tissue. Meanwhile, if cells are meant to be incorporated into an implant, I have to achieve a high level of interaction with the cells. In this case, 3D printing can also help to achieve a textured surface. Our technology, in particular, delivers high precision and reproducibility. This allows you to digitally customize implants, instruments, cutting templates etc. prior to the surgery to fit the patient and thereby save valuable time in the operating room and guarantee a perfect fit of the products.

What’s more, 3D printing can also be a very cost-effective method even with smaller quantities. Meanwhile, a mold in injection molding costs between twenty thousand and one hundred fifty thousand Euros. To make the production a worthwhile investment, you consequently have to produce a large number of implants with this specific mold. 3D printing allows you to efficiently produce even just one single piece though you could theoretically also go into mass production. Even high complexity doesn’t increase costs. Once again, this is not the case with injection molding. The general rule here is that a complex mold design also increases the cost of my injection molding tool.

What makes ceramic such a great material for 3D printed implants and tools?

Bomze: Ceramic materials have different properties. I can choose between a bioinert ceramic material like the classic high-performance ceramics aluminum oxide, zirconium oxide, and silicon nitride or I can use a resorbable biomaterial. The latter types include materials that disintegrate in the body during the healing process, comparable to the absorbable sutures that have been used in surgery for decades. In the field of ceramics, this would be tricalcium phosphate for example. Ideally, the cells break down the material at the same time they grow into the implant. After the healing process, all that’s left is normal body tissue and no disruptive foreign material. What’s more, bioinert ceramic is corrosion resistant, exhibits high mechanical strength and very low thermal conductivity.

3D printing is a cost-effective and efficient process for manufacturing implants and prostheses.

Are there any specific challenges pertaining to this material?

Bomze: The strength of resorbable ceramic is still not as high as we would like. This is an inherent property of this material, that is to say, the material is not as mechanically resistant as conventional high-performance ceramics. However, mixtures and new developments can still yield improvements.

You are participating as a speaker at the 3D fab+print Additive Manufacturing Seminar at COMPAMED 2017. What do you expect from this event?

Bomze: It is always important for us to show potential customers the possibilities and benefits of our technology. It can be specifically used in the medical field to develop new applications that have previously been impossible or not possible at this quality level. Needless to say, we also want to connect with the corresponding decision-makers, engineers, and technicians and assure them that our technology presents a potential solution for many applications that are so far not functioning optimally. And last but not least, we certainly hope that we are able to get a great number of interested people and companies attracted to our process.